Unique IDs for structured fields

Kirby 3 Questions 🤔
1

I’m using Kirby as a headless CMS to provide content via its REST API and need unique IDs to be generated into the txt files. I already tried plugins like AutoID for Kirby3 but these don’t provide this feature for structured fields. Is there any other way to make this happen?

2

The feature for Structure Field IDs was removed from the last update of the AutoID plugin, but you could use the version before.

Other than that, you can create a hook that adds unique IDs to structure fields on save.

3

Thank you for your fast response. I already tried to use an older version of AutoID without success.

The idea of creating an own hook for that sounds promising and I’ll try that one.

4

This is an old one for Kirby 2: https://github.com/texnixe/kirby-structure-id

But might serve as starting point.

5

Happy to share the following hook that I’ve been using in a project where the client adds new project partners to a structure field and the hook assigns each entry with a slug as an ID field - maybe this helps as a starting point?

'page.update:after' => function ( $newPage, $oldPage ) {
	// limit this hook to pages of the blueprint "project"
	if ( $newPage->intendedTemplate() == "project" ) {
		// "partners" is the name of the structure field
		$partners = $newPage->partners()->yaml();
		// loop through all rows in the structure field
		foreach( $partners as &$item ) {
			// turn the title field into a slug to be used as autoid, if none exists
			if (!isset($item['autoid']) || !$item['autoid']) {
				$item['autoid'] = Str::slug( $item['title'] );
			}
		}
		// save the entire "partners" structure back to the file, now with autoids
		$newPage->save([
			'partners' => Data::encode( $partners, "yaml" ),
		]);
	}
}
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6

hi @enjoi. i am the dev responsive for autoid plugin. i dropped support recently when i did a major overhaul of the sourcecode. personally i was no longer convinced that using structures as fake pages is a good idea. but your usecase might diver. please describe your usecase so i can understand better.

7

i am not sure how you codes escapes an endless update loop on the $newPage. you have no such check in pace. maybe kirby does something magical. maybe @texnixe knows.
otherwise it would be a good idea to only save the page if an autoid has actually been added. at least that is what i did up to v1.4.1.

8

@bnomei Why do you think this can end in an endless loop? Since the hook does not update the page, nothing should happen.

9

it calls $newPage->save() on any project. which when saved gets an update hook thus a loop, right? or does calling save() with no changes actually not perform a save and trigger hooks?

10

No, save() doesn’t trigger an update hook for all I can see.

11

ah save() is not update() i was stuck in k2 ways it seems. thanks for explaining.

12

Indeed - and, almost more important: my code is lacking a check that ensures that an ID does not already exists (it simply renders a slug from the title, but that same slug could already exist). It was a quick hack and works ok in the specific context it is used, but definitely something that should be there.

Re your other question about use cases: in my project, the structure is not used as fake pages, but I needed the ID for each row in order to reliably access them from some other page. Say, I have three project pages, each with three partners in a structure “partners”. On the front page of the website, I have an element where four partners of the company can be featured. I want the admin to be able to choose these from the pool of nine partners set up in the projects - therefore the rows in those structures had to have unique IDs.

1 Like
13

i added support for structures again but be sure to test well there might be some hidden bugs left.

2 Likes